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Sechs Lieder, Op 13

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This is one of two of Clara Schumann’s Heine settings that offer our first glimpse of her as a song composer – a Christmas present for her husband in 1840. In fact it was the success of these songs which encouraged Schumann to pester and cajole his wife into collaborating with him on a cycle of Rückert settings in 1841.

Robert apparently once made fun of Clara’s setting of Goethe’s Das Veilchen because she had been completely unaware of the famous Mozart song to that text. (My own experience of solo pianists is that they are not always well informed on the lieder literature.) And one also has to wonder about Ihr Bildnis – the same poem of course which Schubert set as part of his Heine cycle with the title Ihr Bild. The Schwanengesang was published in 1828 and achieved almost instant fame; it seems inconceivable that Robert himself would not have known it, but there is no musical sign that Clara was aware of Ihr Bild, much less that she was overawed by it.

This is just as well, for Clara’s song succeeds on its own terms and would not have benefited by comparison with Schubert’s work. Despite the fact that this sort of chordal progression in the key of E flat major seems reminiscent of Er, der Herrlichste von allen from Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben, the influence here seems Mendelssohnian – hardly a surprise as Clara scarcely had the time to assimilate her husband’s recent transformation of the lieder style. The tender chromaticisms of the opening have something of the salon about them, Mendelssohn in his most unctuous and solicitous mood, but the decorated cadence of the fourth bar, a quintuplet, sounds rather more Schumannesque (this composer was always a man to give old-fashioned mordents a new, loving significance). This introduction peters out and is punctuated with pauses as if the observer of the picture has suddenly become dumbstruck. Fair enough. Schubert’s song begins with a similar (if more effective) gesture: two dotted minims as a rallying point of concentration. It is interesting that when Clara came to publish this song as part of her Op 13 this mysterious beginning had been smoothed out (almost certainly by Robert) into something more conventional.

The tune of the first strophe stems from that of the piano introduction. The setting of the word ‘starrte’ does not, for once, follow the piano melody but burrows into the middle of the chord, a musical analogue for staring. The piano interlude after ‘Heimlich zu Leben begann’ takes on a new liveliness in response to the words. The coming-to-life of the picture is described with new musical material in appropriately livelier mood – the word ‘Lächeln’ is set as a dotted quaver followed by two semiquavers. In order to tighten the structure and increase the musical tension, the third strophe is enjambed with the second – the voice phrased from a minim A natural on ‘Augenpaar’ to the B flat of ‘Auch meine’ Tränen flossen’. This moment (reminiscent of bar 28 of Er, der Herrlichste von allen) adds an edge of histrionic excitement, and the musical material is once again new for this verse. This is the most agitated part of the piece where the singer is permitted a higher tessitura in a more emotionally expansive style. One admires the composer for keeping this in reserve until this point.

There is no real melody as such in this piece, or at least not a truly memorable one. The melody line is in arioso style, where grateful melodic lines are fashioned in response to the words, different for each strophe and giving the impression of spontaneous improvisation. The interrupted cadence with which the piece ends (‘Dass ich dich verloren hab!’) is a nicely Schumannesque touch. Even if it is not quite dramatic enough for the enormous power of the poem, it shows an understanding of the Heine’s typical ‘sting in the tail’ at the end of a lyric. The later version (published as Op 13) removes this feature and opts for a more conventional cadence which makes the poem sound more crestfallen, less horrified. The eight-bar postlude is a mixed blessing: it recapitulates material from the introduction, which is effective enough, but the closing bars – chromatic meandering which prettifies the emotion rather than deepening it – strike a false note. Here the later version is to be preferred.

The poem is from Die Heimkehr, a section of the Buch der Lieder which was not much visited by Robert Schumann – perhaps this is why Clara felt safer in making a choice from these pages when preparing a song for her husband’s thirty-second birthday. Loewe’s setting (1832) – which perhaps Clara knew – also places the music in 6/8, but in an entirely different manner. Instead of Loewe’s smooth and continuous melody, Clara’s music is fashioned from a gently surging motif, a pianistic figure only a bar long. From this comes a sequence of the same idea a third higher, and another sequence higher still. From these little bursts of emotion the whole song is made. The vocal line is similarly fragmented: the composer makes a musical pause after ‘beide’ as well as one after ‘keiner’. This has the effect of incorporating tears into the music as if the poem were being haltingly spoken, the emotion of the situation too great for fluency. Markings of ‘stringendo’ and ‘ritardando’ also suggest rhetorical freedom and emotional involvement, as if the narrator were a close friend of the lovers and deeply upset by their story. Certain elements of Clara’s later relationship with Brahms (a complicated friendship if ever there was one) seem almost eerily foretold with this poem.

This is in fact what would be called a modified strophic setting: the song’s second verse is introduced with much the same Vorspiel that had initiated the first. But the change of detail again shows sensitivity to the text. As before, we have the halting delivery of the earlier lines, but the setting of ‘nur noch zuweilen im Traum’ allows ‘Traum’ to be held for four beats as if a dream were long suspended in the memory. The series of pianistic sequences serves also as a postlude. This may seem unadventurous but such economy has its point in the setting of Heine. Clara has captured the lyric’s sense of mystery, the feeling that the facts behind this enigmatic story go a great deal deeper than the poem is able to say. We have the impression of eavesdropping on a tragedy about which we have too little information. As such it is an admirable setting of a poet whose work can easily suffer from over-fussy musical detail.